Ttraditional Ukrainian embroidery with military weapons and helicopters; a graffiti portrait of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin; Photographs of smartly dressed school leavers standing in the ruins of a bombed-out building in Kharkiv – all featured in an exhibition of Ukraine’s latest artwork.
While the country’s art is perhaps receiving more attention than ever, The Captured House exhibition, which opened in Brussels last week, stands out because 90% of the works have been created since the Russian invasion began on 24 february.
In the first days of the war, Ukrainian artists were in shock. “For about three or four weeks nobody did anything,” said Kate Taylor, curator of the exhibition. “Artists no longer felt the use of art.”
Then in April, she noticed a boom of new jobs on her Instagram. And this was the genesis of a traveling exhibition that has been to Berlin, Rome and Amsterdam, and which opened last week in the EU capital.
With paintings, sculptures and photography by some 50 Ukrainian artists, Taylor hopes to show the cruel reality of war as it is felt every day. “The exhibition is not about the war itself, it is about a humanitarian catastrophe that people are going through.”
Counting all the children killed in the war is the goal of Daria Koltsova, a Kharkiv-born artist who fled Odessa when the conflict began. Having fled to Palermo via Moldova, she felt lost, endlessly reading the news, overwhelmed by minute-by-minute updates on the bombing of Ukrainian cities and the slaughter of children. She began to make little heads out of clay. “It was the pressure that she felt every day, because she received those messages every day. It was very painful and everything started from my way of living all that, a kind of artistic sublimation”.
When the exhibition opened in Berlin, he sat for three hours a day in the basement art space to make the heads, each representing a child killed in war.
Haunting images taken during this time have become part of the Brussels exhibition. Dressed in a simple ancient Ukrainian dress, she carefully sculpts the clay to make the eyes and then the nose. Seemingly reluctant to let go, she adds another little head to the pile of screaming faces. “Every time I finish the sculpture, I say goodbye and let it go,” she said. She works to the beat of an updated version of a traditional Ukrainian lullaby, Oy Khodyt Son Kolo Vikon (The dream wanders through the window.) And as she sculpts, she thinks of the children who will never grow up.
As of July 28, 358 children had been killed and 693 injured according to official sources quoted by the Ukrinform news agency, although the true figure is likely to be much higher.
The artist plans to create a new head for each child killed in the war: “So many people have died that we don’t have enough time to honor the deaths the way they should be honored.”
Other works consider the aggressor, such as Ihor Husev’s images of Russian classics deformed with graffiti. A portrait of Pushkin, the national poet taught in all Russian schools, has been scrawled with Zs, the symbol of the Russian attack. The grandiose and turbulent seascape, The Ninth Wave, by the 19th-century artist Ivan Aivazovsky, is scrawled with the catchphrase “Russian warship fuck you” – the response of Ukrainian defenders to a Russian navy ship that has become a national rallying cry.
These works are part of the “cancel Russia” movement that has led Ukrainian cities to remove sculptures and rename public spaces. But the questioning of Russian high culture is not universally popular in Ukraine, not easy. Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia in Crimea, part of Ukraine that was occupied and later annexed in 2014.
The exhibition also highlights photojournalists whose images brought the horror of war to the world, such as Maksim Levina former Reuters contributor who was killed near Kyiv during the first weeks of the war; and Evgeniy Maloletka, an AP photographer who, along with fellow video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, remained in besieged Mariupol when all other international media had left, to document relentless attacks on civilians, such as pregnant women escaping a bombed-out maternity hospital.
The final exhibit is not a work of art, but a steel door from a house in Irpin. The occupants of the house, a family with two children, fled on foot to Kyiv, 25 kilometers (15 miles) away. They survived. His house was bombed to the ground except for the front door. When the gate arrived in Berlin for the exhibition in early May, it was covered in dust and smelled of fire. “In a way, it was amazing,” recalls Taylor, the curator. “I feel a certain power in art and in those original pieces that will not be possible to show or give away in five years.”
The transformation from a drab house entrance to a war-torn museum display in less than three months underscores the dizzying speed of the artistic response to war. “I always thought that artists needed the time and distance to reflect, especially on a subject like war, but we don’t have that time and distance,” Taylor said.
The exhibition, financed by the Ukrainian government, is part of Kyiv’s cultural diplomacy, aimed at countering arguments that the war was provoked by NATO or Kyiv expansion. Such a narrative the team found mostly in Italy, Taylor said, where polls show people are less likely to see Russia as responsible for the war than in other parts of the EU.
In Berlin, people walked out of the exhibit in tears, while in Rome “our social work” was more important, Taylor said, referring to exhibit attendees who blamed the war on NATO. “And I have nothing to say to that because you need to come to Mariupol and have this conversation.”
After the exhibition closes in Brussels on Sunday, the team hopes to travel to New York, Washington and San Francisco next year to show the reality of the war to an American audience. “We are not here [in Brussels] to ask for money or weapons,” Taylor said. “But we are here for the people to make their decisions when they choose their politicians, when they vote at any level of decision.”